Supersonic

Last week I flew across the country. At least, I tried to.

My first flight out of SFO was delayed, then cancelled. My second flight had a connection that got cancelled. Ultimately I got rebooked through a different city, landed late, and missed my plans for the evening. I spent more time chatting with JetBlue’s support bots than I did in the air. Four and a half hours of flight time, 16 hours door-to-door.

This wasn’t some rare disaster. It’s happened to me at least half a dozen times in the past year, and it’s become the default experience for almost everyone I know.

That’s why, when I read about the return of supersonic travel earlier this month, I didn’t feel awe. I felt exhausted. Because the issue never seems to be how fast the plane can go, it’s everything that has to happen before and after wheels are up.

In 1976, the Concorde made its first commercial flight. It flew from Paris to New York in under four hours, twice the speed of sound. It was loud, sleek, and wildly expensive. Governments subsidized it, celebrities posed on the tarmac next to it, and then, it quietly died in 2003.

Too loud, too fuel-hungry, too constrained by physics, regulation, and unit economics.

It was a technological marvel that never solved a meaningful problem. Sure, it was faster. But it wasn’t better.

Earlier this month, the U.S. officially lifted its 50-year ban on supersonic commercial flights over the continental U.S. Buried in the news cycle, Trump’s Executive Order was short on detail but long on symbolism. The proclamation promises a new generation of aircraft, “low boom” designs, and sustainable fuel.

The loudest (but not too loud) name in this new race is Boom Supersonic, a startup with a lot of funding and a very pretty website. Their flagship aircraft, Overture, is projected to fly at Mach 1.7, carry up to 80 passengers, and run on sustainable aviation fuel. Test flights are scheduled for 2027 and United Airlines has already signed on as the first operating partner.

The renderings are slick and the branding is clean. But the same challenges that plagued the Concorde persist. Most major overland routes still won’t allow supersonic speeds. Tickets will cost thousands. And the infrastructure (airport gates, turnaround workflows, maintenance protocols) simply doesn’t exist yet. Boom might make headlines, but they aren’t making operations better—at least not in a way you or I will feel anytime soon.

Which brings me back to last week, stuck at a terminal eating almonds, playing Wordle archives and refreshing my boarding pass every few minutes to monitor for updates.

My trip wasn’t painful because the plane was slow. The plane was fine. Everything around it was the problem. The broken coordination, the brittle scheduling, and the friction at every edge. That’s the real bottleneck.

Yes, supersonic aviation solves for velocity, but velocity was never the constraint.

Airlines don’t waste our time in the air, they waste it on the ground. They waste it in how crews are scheduled, how connections are structured, how systems fail to adapt when the unexpected hits. And the unexpected always hits. Airlines waste our time by trapping us between apps and agents, watching the clock burn while no one seems to have any idea what is going on.

I’m not anti-speed, I’m pro-competition. And right now, airlines don’t compete on the metrics that matter. They don’t compete on operational precision or logistical resilience. They compete on loyalty programs, legroom, and whether you get warm nuts in business class.

If we actually want to make flying better, we don’t need faster planes. We need real pressure on the system that moves people, not just the one that moves aircraft.

Imagine a world where airlines compete to recover your time. Where they publish real-time data on delays and reroutes. Where missed connections trigger instant bidding from other carriers to win your business. Where logistics are scored, benchmarked, and productized. Incentives work, so we should give airlines a reason to value our time.

Instead, we keep building sleeker vehicles to ride on broken roads.

Supersonic travel is a distraction camouflaged as a breakthrough. It’s a faster engine bolted to a system that still doesn’t know where it’s going. Until airlines are forced to compete on how well they adapt we’ll be stuck in a cycle of first-class promises and economy experiences.

The lessons here transcend aviation. There are takeaways here for operators working to solve every type of problem.

So much of modern business is built around chasing speed: speed to market, speed to scale, speed to close the round. But in most cases, speed is just the visible, flashy thing. The thing that feels like momentum. The deeper work, the actual leverage, is in the structure and how we coordinate to reduce drag.

Here’s what that looks like in real life:

Last month, a new era of aviation was announced. But if I’m being honest, I’d settle for flights that leave on time and land where they’re supposed to.

Until then, supersonic can wait.

Up and to the right.